Good Morning Mission! 03.22.14

Well, all of us freeloaders (I guess) who use Facebook for promotion, might be slightly disturbed by the new possibility of paying to play, reported by Valley Wag. So advertisements alone don’t make the payroll for Facebook?

Facebook pulled the best practical joke of the internet age: the company convinced countless celebrities, bands, and “brands” that its service was the best way to reach people with eyeballs and money. Maybe it is! But now that companies have taken the bait, Facebook is holding the whole operation hostage.

Update: To be perfectly clear, none of this will affect the average Facebook user’s ability to freely use Facebook—only entities that use Facebook as a promotional tool.

A source professionally familiar with Facebook’s marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach” down to 1 or 2 percent. This would affect “all brands”—meaning an advertising giant likeNike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience. Companies on Facebook will have to pay or be pointless. READ MORE

Maybe Facebook will learn what newspapers found out the hard way. Once you give something away for free, users simply think it is free. Pay? No way. The anonymously sourced piece feels like a trial balloon. Thud.